After honoring the 11 nominees for Shelby County's 2012 WHAS ExCel Teacher of the Year Thursday, the school district showed a short video with students from the winner's class stating why that teacher is at the top.

When the film began and Simpsonville fifth-grade teacher Sloane Barnett noticed it included students from her classroom, you could see the surprise on her face. And as it all started to wash over her, a little fist-pump and yes slipped out before she came forward to receive the bouquet of flowers and hear the applause from the crowd at Claudia Sanders.

The company proposing to build an outlet mall just south of Interstate 64 in Simpsonville will be given an opportunity by the Army Corps of Engineers to respond to letters of comment it received about the project.

The Army Corps logged 45 letters of comment during the posted public notice for the 60-acre site, and Horizon Group Properties of Muskegon, Mich., may take until the end of July or longer to review them.

With five vacant principal positions to fill — including at least one at each of the elementary, middle and high school levels — Shelby County Public Schools officials say they hope to add some diversity to those ranks.

And although Shelby County is at or better than the state averages for minority personnel in positions that work with students, it still lags the diversity of its student population.

However, finding and hiring minority candidates is much easier said than done for school districts in Shelby County, Kentucky and the nation.

In a world in which vicious vitriol is the vanguard of criticism, a hundred words could not have been more troubling, not because of what was said but because of what wasn’t said, what was missed, because of the emotion behind the letters and punctuation marks that came together to form the paragraphs.

And now, in the very near future, this dangerously short strip of asphalt will receive a new and presumably safer design as part of the new state roads budget.

We had hoped this was coming, that the General Assembly would follow through on the hard work by state Rep. Brad Montell (R-Shelbyville), state Sen. Paul Hornback (R-Shelbyville) and retired state Sen. Gary Tapp before them.

We’re glad the American Saddlebred Horse Association and its members have settled their very public and divisive spat, one that threatened the stability of one of our key industries and its showplace facility at the Kentucky Horse Park.

Though we had read the position papers and the court findings, we really never understood why there was a spat in the first place.